stock phrase

A well-known, overused phrase; a cliché. As this is a creative writing class, I don't want to see any stock phrases in your stories.Please rewrite this paragraph in your own words, instead of using stock phrases like "think outside the box."

coin a phrase

to coin a phrase

A set phrase said after one uses a new expression. It is typically used jocularly to indicate the opposite (i.e. that one has just used a well-known or trite saying). Well, we can't do anything about it now, so que sera sera, to coin a phrase.

might as well

Should (do something), typically because there is no reason not to. The deadline is today, but you might as well send it in anyway—they may still accept it.A: "Are you going to work late tonight?" B: "I might as well. I have nothing else going on."

coin a phrase

let me (just) say

and just let me say

a phrase introducing something that the speaker thinks is important. Rachel: Let me say how pleased we all are with your efforts. Henry: Why, thank you very much.Bob: Just let me say that we're extremely pleased with your activity. Bill: Thanks loads. I did what I could.

might as well

and may as well

a phrase indicating that it is probably better to do something than not to do it. Bill: Should we try to get there for the first showing of the film? Jane: Might as well. Nothing else to do.Andy: May as well leave now. It doesn't matter if we arrive a little bit early. Jane: Why do we always have to be the first to arrive?

to put it another way

and put another way

a phrase introducing a restatement of what someone, usually the speaker, has just said. Father: You're still very young, Tom. To put it another way, you don't have any idea about what you're getting into.John: Could you go back to your own room now, Tom? I have to study. Put another way, get out of here! Tom: Okay, okay. Don't get your bowels in an uproar!

turn of phrase

A particular arrangement of words, as in I'd never heard that turn of phrase before, or An idiom can be described as a turn of phrase. This idiom alludes to the turning or shaping of objects (as on a lathe), a usage dating from the late 1600s.

to coin a phrase

You say to coin a phrase to show that you are using an expression that people will know. Stunned Jackson was, to coin a phrase, `sick as a parrot'. Note: To coin a new word means to invent it or use it for the first time. In this expression, the term is being used ironically.

To see the women expressing their liberal forgetfulness of my wifely misfortunes, and the men their amiable anxiety to encourage her husband; to hear the same set phrases repeated in every room--'So charmed to make your acquaintance, Mrs.

Their text, again, is often interrupted by the insertion of brief phrases explanatory of unusual words.

Phrases are often repeated in the ballads, just as in the talk of the common man, for the sake of emphasis, but there is neither complexity of plot or characterization nor attempt at decorative literary adornment--the story and the emotion which it calls forth are all in all.

Thorough unity, either in the whole or in the separate stories so loosely woven together, could not be expected; in continual reading the long succession of similar combat after combat and the constant repetition of stereotyped phrases become monotonous for a present-day reader; and it must be confessed that Malory has little of the modern literary craftsman's power of close-knit style or proportion and emphasis in details.

We would not, however, have our reader imagine, that persons of such characters as were supported by Thwackum and Square, would undertake a matter of this kind, which hath been a little censured by some rigid moralists, before they had thoroughly examined it, and considered whether it was (as Shakespear phrases it) "Stuff o' th' conscience," or no.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism," "Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.

He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures.

She tried to talk to him, partly by signs, partly in pidgin French, which, for some reason, she thought would be more comprehensible to him, and she had half a dozen phrases of English.

Ida sat listening to the stumbling words and awkward phrases which were whispered from the back of her, but there was something in Charles Westmacott's clumsiness of speech which was more moving than the words of the most eloquent of pleaders.

In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech.

On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations.

Hesiod's diction is in the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre- Hesiodic peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when `the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless house'; to cut one's nails is `to sever the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches'; similarly the burglar is the `day-sleeper', and the serpent is the `hairless one'.

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